At lunch this weekend with a bunch o’ writers, Vonda McIntyre asked a question I couldn’t answer. I could paraphrase it for you, but Vonda’s blog over at Book View Cafe puts it more elegantly than I could:

In the pre-Columbian Eastern hemisphere, what we used to call in geography class “The Old World,” most of the staple foods are based on the action of microbes: Bread, beer, wine, yoghurt, cheese, sauerkraut, kefir, injira, miso. Fish sauce.

In the pre-Columbian Western hemisphere, this is not true.

Why?

[…]

When I ask the question, whether I pose it to historians, anthropologists, foodies, or friends I’m hanging around with over a fermented beverage, everybody else says either, “Huh, I never thought of that!” or “But Native Americans had corn beer.” This is true. They also had chocolate, whose production includes a fermentation step. But none of the fermented foods in the Americas before Columbus were staple foods, as far as I can make out. They were ceremonial. Chocolate was reserved for the nobility, and the male nobility at that.

My first thoughts are in two sets.

First: the issue of plenty and/or climate. If you have a great balanced diet of grains (maize) and pulses (all those beans), it’s not as important to be able to break down the grains with fermentation to free extra nutrients. Also, I think that big chunks of the New World are arid, so perhaps preservation of food (dry those beans, parch that corn, air-dry or smoke that buffalo) was as much of an issue and so lessened the need for bacterial cultures as a preservation strategy. (And various bacteria do less well in arid conditions. Though, hey, the south and its humidity renders all those arguments moot.) Then there the question of whether the lack of dairy goodness (cheese, yoghurt) is a function of lack of domesticity of milk animals or the other way around: did no one bother to domesticate animals whose food they couldn’t store long-term?

Second: photosynthesis. Specifically, the difference between C3 and C4 photosynthesis. There’s a lot more C4 photosynthesis in the New World than the Old. It just seems as though that should have something to do with it. (I cheerfully admit those many of my ‘intuitions’ about science are wrong.) I just don’t know enough biochemistry or botany to figure it all out.

28 thoughts on “Microbial food action: Old World vs. New”

Jared Diamond goes into a partial answer to this question in his “Guns, Germs, and Steel” (which includes a remarkable section on the development of corn into a staple crop). I don't remember all the arguments now, but it did have a lot to do with both geography, lack of urbanization (except in South America, where the urbanization took a direction not followed in the Old World) and simple availability of resource. Anyway, I recommend it.

Here's my theory, though it's neither grand nor unified: they didn't use fermentation because they had nixtamalization. It achieves the same ends as fermentation, basically making maize suitable as a staple. (Otherwise you get nutrient deficiencies if that's your base food.) It makes sense to me that the two processes “co-evolved” (like insect and bird wings). What do you think? p.s. all my info comes from Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt. I intend to consult with the Cambridge World History of Food when I get home.

It might depend upon location and time period, but in many Maya areas chocolate was consumed as just a part of everyday life, by members of lower social strata as well. Also, google “huitlacoche” — one person's corn smut is another's delicacy, even today. There are non-ceremonial microbially-altered items in the First Nations repertoire, but they're often not well-known beyond those cultures.

Part of it may be that there were simply more chemical or mechanical methods of food preservation that worked fine, coupled with the different lifeways born of a different set of ecologies. Despite your comment about the diet, maize isn't very nutritious if you don't nixtamalize it (boil it in water with potash/lime), which many cultures did; do that, and you've got something properly edible and nutritious (hominy, or you can make masa from it, the basis of tortillas). Smoked and dried meats keep fine. My Chinook grandfather also once pointed out to me the previous existence of “Chinook olives”, which are acorns kept underground and cured with urine.

Another thing: Many Native cultures had a stronger focus on hygiene and cleanliness, and specific ideas about that, especially compared to European ones through much of history. Fermentation would have been discovered by accident on either continent, but actively leaving food to spoil/being desperate enough to eat what one perceives as spoiled food would probably occur in very different contexts between the two continents.

As to domesticated animals, the Western dichotomy of domestic/wild often doesn't really apply to pre-Contact Native cultures — animals are eaten, sure, but the human perceptions of that relationship were quite different. Deer are eaten, but they're obtained as needed rather than penned in — having enough food lying around to feed animals is a luxury, and it's much easier to get that with dogs (which Westerners would perceive the Natives as having domesticated) than with the primary food species. If the animals aren't tractable and keeping them confined is both impractical and morally unpleasant, why do it at all? Eurasian-style agriculture is not an inevitable step that Natives just somehow missed; it's a relatively rare phenomenon that's merely gotten very big and widespread because large population yields and aggressive cultures have managed to impose it as standard…in the vast number of Native societies that were hunter-gatherers at least part-time, there's also the fact that hard work doesn't pay off past a certain point — food-gathering IS a risky activity. If you know how to do it intelligently and well, you can maximize the yield of just a few hours a day — but go over, and you might crash the carrying capacity of your environment. With agriculture, back-breaking labor yields massive profits, but you're not going to see any culture make a seamless transition from one to the other. Horticulture or pastoralism and then agriculture blend in with food gathering in many societies, and it takes special conditions to turn almost entirely to intensive agriculture.

As for dairy, you're only going to see that arise in a population that's been living with relatively “domesticated” animals for a long time, long enough that they start finding uses for the secondary products of the animals. The milk a cow produces can be worth more nutrition over a year than the meat of the entire cow, but in order to notice and try this out, you'd have to be living with the cows in close proximity, for long periods of time, using them as meat animals or otherwise deriving some concrete, first-order benefit from devoting your efforts to maintaining them.

Basically, it's a cultural non-starter: working unnecessarily despite the obvious common-sense alternative, while getting tired and sore and filthy, at doing something your people probably see as morally-repugnant, when there are acceptable alternatives already in evidence that get the same basic job done just fine, combined with cultural inertia and the fact that it's just plain easier to use known, tried-and-true methods than invent them from scratch in the vast majority of cases.

That, I think, is why we don't see many equivalents of fermented or agricultural second-order products, and why there are fewer high-profile microbially-altered goods, in the Americas prior to contact. It just doesn't fit the context well; it's only terribly surprising to colonizers who assume their lifeway was more or less an inevitable process of history. >>

Sandeli, yes, I think the 'it worked fine without microbes' answer (it being nutrition) is probably the closest we'll get. But what about the fun factor? The let's get wasted and party side effect of fermentation?

I think we need about twelve answers, and then spend the next year assembling a nifty mosaic of same that makes the most sense.

Beer and wine, by contrast, are products of an already-agricultural society (Sumer), and the “let's have fun and get wasted” element of consumption played into the hierarchical class system already present in Sumerian culture. The peasants and slaves and such take in beer as relief from a hard day's work and unwind.

About the closest you'll get to that dynamic in North America is among the Mexica (Aztecs), and it's a very imperfect analogy at that. Maybe the Inca in South America. Two rather exceptional cases in the midst of a trend that pulls the other direction — if you've got loads of free time and life is good, the altered state isn't going to be a relief from all that, and thereby supplant hunter-gatherer traditions of using this stuff in a ceremonial or medicinal context.

Also keep in mind that in many native societies, ceremonial and casual drug use were often hard to distinguish to an outsider…

Nicola: Context again. There are plenty of mind-altering substances in the Americas that don't *require* fermentation. Also, the social structures differ — hunter-gatherer cultures use such substances, but they tend to treat the altered state as being culturally or spiritually significant. This is true in the case of pre-monotheist societies in Eurasia as well.

By comparison, look at the history of beer — developed in an already-agricultural society (Sumer) with highly-stratified social roles. Lower social classes are drinking beer as a relief from the general state of their lives.

Peyote or psilocybin, or even tobacco, just don't have the same background of use patterns.

Now, there certainly were huge, urbanized, highly-stratified societies in the Americas, but they were outliers against a trend — even many *large* settled societies still had part-time or even full-time subsistence modes more in line with the hunter-gatherer model. Basically, the use patterns you're thinking of are the products of a different way of life — there were recreational and medicinal drugs in Native societies, but they weren't primarily a means of escape or coping, and many were never divorced from their spiritual significance at all.

Wonderful conversation! You don't have to do anything to dry shell beans. I didn't know this until we started growing them as part of growing more of our own food. You just let the beans mature until the pods become papery and then, presto, dry beans. If they're not quite mature when the rains start, you can cook them right away or lay them out on a flat surface and they'll dehydrate a bit. In a drier climate than ours (Central Coast California), I doubt that would be much of an issue.

As it happens, I once wrote a long involved paper on the nutritional consequences of changing from hunter-gatherer to farmer in the Southwest (this was back in the mid-60s and got my anthro prof very excited.) I have that paper and the supporting data “somewhere” but am not hunting it out right now.

Maize wasn't the original primary grain in use in that (and perhaps other) areas: other native (and yes, C-4) grasses were (many hunting gathering groups collected seeds of other grasses, including of course American wild rice.) Its nutritional profile differs from Old World grains: it has A and C, which rice, wheat, barley, oats and rye don't, but busts on the B-complex and has a different amino acid profile. That's why legumes plus native squash fruits complement it and make it useful as a base nutrient. Some New World grasses have the same profiles as Old World grains, and those cultures using them did not risk shortages of the B-complex vitamins.

The switch to lower-protein and B-complex deficient maize, as North American groups switched from hunter-gather subsistence to cultivation, risked seasonal vitamin deficiencies. Hunter-gatherers risked seasonal caloric shortage in some years, but not vitamin deficiency. Over the long haul, a consistent, adequate-to-abundant supply of calories will grow a population, and some deficiencies come on slowly enough that replacement within a month or two works well.

With respect to bacterial/fungal contribution to foods, consciousness-altering fermentation was known from more than one plant group. I would not be at all surprised to find that pre-colonial groups used bacterial/fungal processes for a variety of uses.

But three other uses of bacterial fermentation in the Old World would not have worked with New World food resources. Yeast to make leavened bread works only with grains that have gluten and are ground fairly fine. For that matter, not all yeasts make good bread from wheat flour; the “starters” passed down for generations for both beer and bread were chosen by unknown bakers and brewers from a wide range of yeasts. Unleavened breads are known around the world; leavened breads developed where wheat was native.

Fermented dairy products depend on the herding or pasturing of animals that a) give tasty milk, b) are amenable to being milked, and c) do not need all the milk they produce to raise live young. I don't know why the South Americans did not milk their llamas and vicunas, but there are several possibilities related to the biology of the animals. In North America, there were no domesticated sheep, goats, cattle or domesticated reindeer (used as a source of milk in the Old World.)

Wine depends on both an abundance of grapes producing tasty juice and the right fermentation organisms. Many North American grapes are small and lack a high sugar content even when ripe. Others contain substances (actually very tiny, very sharp crystals) that irritate the skin and mucus membrane of many people–pressing mustang grapes for juice gives many people a rash and the juice requires filtering to make drinkable juice or jelly. Filtration requires something to act as a filter…and here the availability of both the right fiber plants and the right weaving technology come into play.

Sandeli, I have up close and personal experience with many fine mind-altering substances–and yes, the communities and occasions are very, very different. Many thanks for your input. One addition: lots of Old World people used alcohol to render water safe. So this might be a chicken-and-egg situation: in some climates, lots of microbes (in water) makes fermentation (beer/wine) necessary for human health and hygiene.

Deborah, I didn't know that!

Elizabeth, welcome. And thank you. And if you ever do dig out that paper, please post it somewhere for us to read. Meanwhile, I'll mull this lovely long comment.

This is a great conversation about fermentation practices across time and space. In addition to lime and ash to “nixtamal” maize, precolonial Mesoamerican communities also made pulque (fermented agave). On my hunch that there were many other fermenting practices, I floated your question to Professor emeritus Eugene Anderson (anthropologists and expert of food traditions across Asia and the Americas) about this topic. Here are some of his comments:

“The idea on nixtamalization is incredibly perceptive and right on… It does indeed do what yeast leavening does in the old world: make the corn edible and nutritious. You can't yeast-leaven corn bread because there is no gluten in corn…

“The fermentation of the old world is of two kinds: yeast (alcohol, leavened wheat bread) and Lactobacillus with or without related critters (salami, yogurt, soy sauce, sauerkraut, other sour foods). Yeast fermentation was originally used in both old and new worlds to make booze, and then subsequently got into the bread in the old world but couldn't in the new for lack of gluten in the flour. It works only in wheat bread and even there mostly only in bread wheat, which outcrossed to a gluten-rich wild grass 8000 years ago…

“The New World had plenty of booze… Corn beer, pulque, fruit wines, and all kinds of booze were all over the place and by no means limited to the elite … chocolate got around too…

“Lactobacillus fermentation probably started with sourdough bread and with yogurt, and again it wouldn't work in the dough in the New World for lack of gluten, and of course the New World never had dairying. But Lactobacillus fermentation also arose as a by-product of salting. Preserving food by salt leads to killing all other bacteria, but lactobacilli survive in a moist salt environment and add their own preserving effort by turning the lactose into lactic acid, which is strongly preservative. The commentator who pointed out that the New World is much drier and thus preserved everything by drying rather than salting is quite right. Also most of the New World was short of salt.

“Fish “fermentation” usually isn't. Fish products miscalled “fermented” are mostly autodigested. The fish and shellfish are salted so highly that all bacteria are killed, and the digestive fluids of the fish etc. just digest the whole mass, producing nuoc mam, nam pla, ha gou, bagung, patis, and all the other wonderful fish products of east and southeast Asia.

“Lactobacillus is a trivial part of the fermentation of agave sap into pulque, and appears in some other new world ferments, but, yes, it never got around and nobody made sauerkraut or salami over here.

“Another reason not to ferment in the New World was that chiles are powerfully bacteriocidal and especially fungicidal–that's why the plant has capsaicin: not to make Mexican food enjoyable to humans, but to save the fruit from fungal wilt. So the areas with chile peppers used chile powder to preserve stuff. I think in the Old World the lactobacillus-and-salt techniques are mostly temperate zone, from salting down food for the winter. In the tropics, they don't use it except as a transfer technology from the temperate zones (like soy ferments in southeast Asia–introduced from China). The tropics use spices to do their preserving. Old world spices, like chile, are preservative. Black pepper especially; pepper and salt got to be universal seasonings because they were universal preservatives, in combination. Other spices are less effective but do some good. Similarly with herbs and oils.

“Another thing the New World peoples did was use a lot of foods that are high in chemicals and thus preserve themselves, without effort. Not only chiles, but also acorns, quinoa, lupines, potatoes, etc. Manioc preserves itself by means of its cyanogenic glycosides. In the Amazon, where drying and spicing are almost useless, the main crop was manioc, which is simply left in the ground till wanted. In fact people selected for more poisonous strains, which sounds silly till you realize it's about ground-storage. We have now bred the nasties out of potatoes and many strains of manioc, so they are harder to preserve.”

Since the software has deigned to notice my existence, I will try to say thank you for all the good information.

A lot of what I said in the disappeared comments boiled down to “Read _1491_ by Charles C. Mann. Fantastic, heartbreaking book.” The bit I was trying to convey from it was that the western hemisphere, pre-columbus, had few if any water-borne endemic human diseases, so the antibacterial effect of alcohol, so important in the eastern hemisphere — where you were likely to contract cholera, typhus, etc., if you drank the water — was less important in the western hemisphere.